The present disclosure relates to computer devices, graphics processing, and texture compression.
Video games are experiencing problems with textures taking up too much storage space, e.g., hard disk space, optical media space, and/or download size, in order to provide detail at resolutions now used for video games. For example, a video game may take up 100 GB of storage, of which 30-60 GB may be the textures to provide detail at 4K resolutions. There is another problem with the speed with which games can load in textures having a relatively large storage footprint. Games generally use block compression at runtime to save memory, bandwidth, and cache pressure, however, these schemes have a fixed compression ratio. Other schemes present far better compression ratio for the textures but may not be in a format directly usable by the graphics processing unit (GPU). Moreover, there is a desire for an increasing amount of textures with more variations.
Thus, there is a need in the art for improvements in texture compression.